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Canonical shares U1DB technical preview

When Canonical announced it was stopping its use of CouchDB, it also announced it would also be dropping DesktopCouch, the desktop API for CouchDB, and creating its own solution, U1DB, to fill the gap. The Canonical developers have now announced that a technical preview of U1DB is available and have given more details of its functionality. According to the announcement, U1DB is an API and data model designed to be backed by any database for storage. The API has been created to enable the storage of JSON documents in synchronised databases and to make that process simple.

The technical preview, and reference implementation, currently implements this as a Python API backed by SQLite. There is also a Vala implementation and the developers are planning on iOS (Objective C with SQLite) and Android (Java with SQLite) implementations in the future. As part of the technical preview process, the developers are looking for feedback on a number of open questions regarding portable APIs, revision ID management, HTTP authorisation, indexing and replication; a mailing list is available for discussions.